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2 Saving Beijing's historic
neighborhoods By Pallavi Aiyar
BEIJING - Standing atop the Jingshan Park
hill, just north of the Forbidden City, provides
the most commanding view of Beijing, the nerve
center of one of the greatest civilizations of the
world for most of the past 900 years. This is a
city that is saturated in history, haunted by the
ghosts of warlords and khans, merchants and
scholars, revolutionaries and poets.
Looking around from Jingshan hill,
however, it is difficult to conjure up visions of
these ghosts. What you do see radiating out in all
directions from the nucleus of the Forbidden City
are construction
sites, monstrously large
earth-moving machines, and predatory cranes
rearing up their mechanical heads high into the
sky.
As Beijing gears up to host the
Summer Olympic Games next year, it is anxious to
project itself as a modern world-class capital.
However, wrong-footed conceptions of modernity
combined with a weak legal system and corrupt
collusion between real-estate developers and local
officials has resulted in the wanton demolition of
large swaths of the historical city. In the
process, not only have up to half of the physical
neighborhoods that once comprised the capital's
center been destroyed, but so has much of the
city's social fabric.
The primary object
of Beijing's demolition spree has been the
hutongs, the narrow tree-lined alleyways
that used to make up the entire
62-square-kilometer area surrounding the Forbidden
City. Hutongs have been both the arteries
and the lifeblood of Beijing since Mongol times,
in the 13th century. They represent a long-lasting
organic connection between the present and
multi-layered past of China's capital city.
Hutongs are flanked on either side
by traditional Beijing-style courtyard homes
called siheyuan, or four-sided gardens.
Over the centuries, complex family dramas played
out inside the high, gray-tiled walls of these
siheyuan, as generations of the same family
and the servants who catered to them lived under a
single roof, much in the same style as India's
joint families.
The siheyuan were
the quintessence of glamour, wealth and privilege
in imperial China and thus among the most obvious
targets for the communists, who deplored them as
symbols of feudal decadence. From 1949 after the
communist accession, all hutong homes were
expropriated by the state and handed over to work
units, which then allocated accommodation to
workers.
Over the next few decades,
formerly grand homes gradually grew dilapidated,
with single siheyuan coming to house a
dozen or so families, five or more to a room. But
although the hutongs no longer exuded the
elegance of imperial times, they continued to be
the fulcrum of lao Beijing, or "old
Beijing" society. The native Beijingers or lao
Beijingren who lived here were the inheritors
and safe-keepers of all that made the city unique:
the growling local accent, the warming street
snacks, the sense of being connected to the
hutongs by roots that ran deep.
As
the hutongs were too narrow for
supermarkets, the needs of residents were provided
by small corner shops called xiaomai bu and
by itinerant service providers, who brought in
supplies of coal for the freezing winters,
sharpened knives on request, and even cleaned out
dirty ventilators.
According to the
Beijing Cultural Heritage Protection Center
(BCHP), a non-governmental organization, today
there are fewer than 1,000 of these hutongs
left, down from an estimated 4,000 in the 1940s.
The "New Beijing, Olympic Beijing" that
red banners all across the capital city promise to
build has thus emerged on the ashes of the
hutongs. In their stead are a rash of
mega-malls, luxury highrise residences and glitzy
office spaces.
According to He Shuzhong,
the founder of the BCHP, the fast-paced
destruction of one of the world's most historic
cities has been allowed to take place primarily
because the notion of "conservation" in China has
traditionally been an extremely narrow one. He
says the Chinese government tends to regard
heritage as consisting of a few high-profile,
well-maintained and grand buildings such as the
Forbidden City or Temple of Heaven.
The
hutongs in their ordinariness and
dilapidated present are often simply dismissed as
slums without any historic value. The authorities
"don't take into consideration the social history
that the hutongs represent or their value
as authentic and living examples of traditional
Beijing architecture", He said.
This
explanation was confirmed in an interview with the
deputy communications director of the Beijing
Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games, Sun
Weide. Sun smiled when he boasted that there is so
much construction going on in Beijing currently
that the municipal authorities have to update the
maps of the city every three months.
Important historical sites will be
protected, he continued, but hutongs with
"no historical value" will be destroyed. But as He
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